


Close

by CrossedBeams



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M, First Time, MSR, Office Shenanigans, UST, little angst, lots of resolution, some resolution
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-27
Updated: 2016-07-24
Packaged: 2018-07-18 14:48:32
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 9,802
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7319491
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CrossedBeams/pseuds/CrossedBeams
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes it takes a little while to get the ending you want... Inspired by a fellow writer who pointed out how Dana Scully is queen of speedy orgasms I decided to write something to shake that up a bit! Post Millenium, NSFW. Utter smut but with a poetic edge.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The First Time

Normally he is clothes strewn across the floor and she is across town, all things stacked neatly in a hamper but tonight they are neither. Tonight is different.

Mulder hadn’t planned to kiss her, one arm pinned to him, unable to touch her face and lose itself in her hair but like most important moments in his life his first time kissing Scully had not gone as planned. He’d dreamed it more times than he’d had his Samantha nightmare; awake and asleep he imagined the taste of her, warm and wine soaked after a case in front of a fire or cool and laughing in the rain like that first week in Oregon. Scully deserved more than hospital smells and TV static, she deserved more than him but almost by accident he’d asked the six-year question and the world hadn’t ended.

If anything it had begun again and this time in Scully’s image instead of Gods. Mulder had thought before that his whole universe was bounded by her small frame but he had been wrong, before tonight he hadn’t known this part of her. He had worshipped her but never before had he lost himself to her. How could he without knowing simple things like the fact that his two hands spread apart on her shoulder blades under her shirt would fit like wings or that he would be able to taste her heartbeat in his mouth when he breathed into her neck? 

People have all sorts of poetic things to say about great love and its discovery but Mulder knows that what it really boils down to is knowing that even if the rest of the world vanishes there will be one figure clinging on in the emptiness. That his one person was Scully. Every time he fell or woke up from almost-death she was there, holding on in a way that nobody had ever held on for him before. Nobody had ever loved him more than they cared what everyone thought, more than they cared for their own safety, more than they loved themselves. True love seemed too trite a description for that kind of commitment and Mulder had tried to tell Scully as much before but the words hadn’t gone far enough. They never could when this language of bodies remained unspoken, one sense unused.

It doesn’t matter anymore though. They have discovered it and are learning fast, breath for breath and hand in hand.

Scully can’t remember exactly how she got from the hospital to her apartment. The gap between Mulder pressing her against her car and kissing every part of her face and his hands sliding under her coat as she fumbled her key three times before managing to unlock her door is blurry. Everything is blurry except for him and his hands and his mouth on her skin. Her belongings look different from the tangle of his arms; the chaste solid surface of her dining table will now always be the place where she fought his t-shirt over his sling while his fingers signed his ownership of her into the skin of her hips. It’s a messy desperate journey from there to her bedroom and the glass covering the diagram of her father’s ship is the first casualty, dragged down by her scrambling fingers as Mulder makes a rest stop to push her against the wall and reach between her legs to beckon her home.

This is no choreographed love scene. The bed sheds case files instead of rose petals when she drags him on top of her and the candles she lights on lonely nights to soothe her mind while her fingers to soothe her hunger for for him remain unlit. Spread now in the filtered streetlight under Mulder’s devouring gaze Scully begins to forget what lonely feels like. His tongue slithers past her breast, dips into her navel and continues south, taking with it the frustration of moments left untouched in hallways. Manoeuvring her thighs clumsily with one arm, he breathes “Scullyy - oh - God” into the wet heat between her legs, warm air chased by hot lips and then pleasure. It’s too much and not enough, the licks of orgasm beginning to gather in her fingers get lost in his hair and she needs to see him when she comes undone for him, to know that this is real. 

Denying herself his talented mouth in her search for connection Scully slides down under her partner and gathers him up, balancing him as he shuffles to the top of the bed, torn between touching her and needing his one good arm to support himself. Scully half-smiles at this, how typical it is of them to choose this moment, the end of a hellishly long day with Mulder injured, to take this step. They are the poster children for doing the right thing at the wrong time, of missing moments. But then he weaves his fingers in hers and it’s not so funny any more.

Just the barest brush of him against her and this is the perfect moment. Her Mulder propped against her headboard and watching with the wonder she thought he reserved for mysterious lights in the sky, waiting for her to come to him as he has waited so many times before in less important scenes. Time now slows as if to counter the urgency of the past few minutes and soft meets hard in a long-imagined kiss. Mulder is tall and she is small and as she rocks herself onto him, gasping at every centimetre, hands braced on his chest she thinks she should probably be breaking around him. But she isn’t. His eyes are on her, dipping down to where they are finally joined as if to check it is really happening and between his gaze and his body Scully feels as if some part of her that has been missing for a long time has just returned. She has always been strong but now she is stronger, this final frontier crumbling away to reveal iron strength instead of the expected vulnerability.

Mulder feels it too, the victory of realising that this makes them stronger instead of weaker and as she finally comes to rest against him Scully purrs with satisfaction. He responds to the animal instinct, wrapping his good arm close around her ass and pulling him flush to her, demanding more flesh, more friction and her mouth back on his. Forgetting the day he tries to raise his injured arm to her throat and hisses at the pain, at all the places he wants to touch but can’t but she doesn’t care about that right now. Being here is enough and the world is shrinking to the few square feet around them, the wild beat of their hearts and the rising tempo at the centre of it all.

Scully has never been a particularly voyeuristic lover, sensations always seemed bigger with her eyes pressed shut but with Mulder things are different. The way he grits his teeth, jaw clenched as he fights to hang on for her is addictive. She’s seen him lose control before but never because of her, never because of the hypnotic rhythm of his cock disappearing into her. His breathing is beginning to hitch and sweat is beading on his chest in the divots left by her fingernails. Though she has never seen Mulder come, Scully knows him well enough to realise that he is close, too close and that short of making him stop while she catches up she is not close enough. The realisation frees her to drink in every moment of him and she does so greedily, squeezing her internal muscles to make him choke out her name in a voice so broken it is barely recognisable. She winds her fingers into his hair, caging his face and runs her thumbs to his mouth, forcing him to look at her as the black of his pupils spreads and his eyes turn liquid. She hangs on as his thrusts turn erratic, syllables of nonsense that mean love and revelation and “finally Scully you’re mine” slipping from his lips as he pours himself into her. Body and soul.

She holds him then, mumbling her own promises into his shoulder, choked by the emotion of it all as the enormity of what they have done muddles with the exhaustion of the day. Mulder rolls to his side and tucks her close to his chest where his steady heartbeat answers all of her questions. No, this wont ruin everything. Yes, he loves her. Yes, he will stay. 

She’s almost asleep when she feels him stiffen, feels him whisper, “Scully - you didn’t finish” and she shakes her head and soothes him with a soft palm on his chest. Fox Mulder carries guilt for many things but her sometimes elusive orgasm is not going to be one of them. Sleepily scooting up until she can reach his mouth with hers she whispers, “there’s always tomorrow”.

The last thing she feels as she drifts to sleep is his body relaxing into her promise, that this will still be real in the morning. 


	2. The Morning

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The morning after the lifetime before...

Mulder has lost count of the times he’s seen the dawn from long runs and insomniac nights, those still times when the beauty in the world outweighs the stupidity, the evil and the loss. He likes to draw them out, to sit alone and try to catalogue the colours of each individual sky, filing the swatches under S in his mind to pull out as needed on cloudy days. But sunrise had never looked so beautiful as it does on her skin and he knows, going forward, that this is the only memory he will need.

He slept fitfully, some part of his brain keeping consciousness close to the surface to make sure that she was still there, that this was still happening. And it is. He slips out from the cradle of her arms two minutes before the alarm to silence it and now stands shadowy at the window, watching her sleep in nothing but gold light and the scent of him and her finally together.

He has waited six years for this morning; two before he knew how badly he wanted it and four where Scully’s every half-smile lit that dark office with his desperate desire. The reality is better than his dreams. The warm cream that is Scully sweetens everything and his world is the better for it. Mulder wants to tell her that but first he has to find the perfect way to wake her, to add blue eyes and white teeth to this perfect picture without losing the stillness and the magic.

She stirs a little, stretching out into the space he has left without missing him, her bed a conquered territory not yet used to its invader. The expanse of white should make her look tiny but she sprawls so freely, with such abandon that for all the vulnerability of her nakedness she is as imposing here as she is in the sharpest of her suits. Mulder has always had a complex relationship with beds; for him the confines of a sofa have long been preferable to blank sheets full of memories and things lost or stolen in the night. There is less room for regret in the blue TV light of his living room. Now though, for the first time in a long time he wants to belong, to be more than a visitor. He wants Scully to make space for him in her bed just as she has made space for him in her life and her heart. This would be somewhere he could retreat to in a way that Morris Fletcher’s waterbed never was, a safe place. Their place.

It’s for this reason and a thousand much more sentimental ones that he decides against waking her with his mouth, climbing softly back to her side and smiling when her next small movement brings her back to his arms, tousled head close to his heart.

Soon he’s drifting in and out of sleep, in and out of the reality that is her pressed close to him and waiting for the moment where he feels her breathing change, eyelashes fluttering butterfly kisses on the hard planes of his chest. He doesn’t move, waiting for Scully to take the lead in their first morning after the lifetime before and thinks that he could die happy when he feels her smile and a husky “G’morning”, breaks their soft silence. She greets him with a brush of her nose to his jaw. He is welcome. He is hers.

Now it is time for more. Now it is time to relive the night before, to clasp her head and to kiss her until she’s more than awake, breathing hard and heavy into his mouth.

As Mulder retraces his path towards unfinished business Scully marvels at how naturally this fits them. How soundly she has slept in his arms and how refreshed she feels. It’s as if the years spent waiting were a weight she no longer has to carry, the darkness clearing and for once revealing only a truth that is not so complicated after all. This, them together, is as simple, clear and as flawless as the way he looks at her now, mouth on her breast as if it has always been normal for him to see her like this. And then there is not space in her for philosophy as promise melts into sensation, matter governing mind.

There’s a delicate balance of tongue and lips and teeth that is essential to the successful shelling of sunflower seeds and Mulder is putting that balance to good use. Lips first, grazing the outlines  of where her underwear would normally be, whispering sweet filthy things that make her gasp and push herself towards him, slickening and wanting. His voice as he explores every secret crease of her is the same one he uses to mumble through theories at his desk before he brings them to her for approval. It’s the same tongue that she has watched run aimless over his lips while he weighs his words but now it’s quiet and purposeful, running in ever shorter streaks just millimeters from where she wants it. And then teeth, pinches of clarity in the dizzying sensation that she hopes will leave small marks to memorialise their presence. It’s the teeth that make her cry out, that make her beg “Mulder, please” as every nerve ending in her body swims down to where he watches her, to where he will finish what he started last night.

His name in Scully’s breathless plea is Mulder’s new favourite sound. He hears it over and over again in the air and in his head as he gives in to her need. His tongue, flat and deliberate runs up  steadily where she has spread herself for him. She tastes like resolution; the sharp of hard work and the sweetness of success. She tastes of Eden, like a woman ought to taste, of innocence and sin. He wants more and ignoring the throb of his bad arm he leans his weight on the elbow to free his other hand, dancing his fingers down her velvet thigh and into the fray. She’s wet enough that one, then two fingers slip in and are greeted with a moan of pleasure, a gentle rhythm added to the flicker of his tongue against her clitoris, undoing her ties to the grounding weight of the mattress as she arches into him, clutching blindly at his hair.

It could be minutes or hours later that she finds clarity again, when he presses up hard and finds the sweet spot that it took her three years and an expensive vibrator to figure out. Her eyes snap open at the sensation, hot and hard inside her and against her and she cries out his name, his proud smile brushing against her as he pauses, split second, for the final act. Scully presses her cheek into the sheet, searching for somewhere to focus as he begins again, her partner, her everything reading her body as every breath pumps pleasure into the deepening well of her orgasm.

The hands of her clock anchor her in the moment, ticking away the seconds before she will dissolve into him. 09:12:37. 09:12:38

She freezes. Tugging his hair not in encouragement but in panic. 9:12!

‘Mulder we’re late!’.

He hums his lack of interest into her but her arousal has morphed into panicked adrenaline and she scrabbles out from beneath him, knocking him off balance and running for the bathroom. He follows seconds later, mouth still wet with her and presses her to the sink, unapologetic.

‘Scully, we’ve been on time most days for six damn years. They can handle the budget meeting without us… come back to bed,’ and she almost gives in to him, as she has given in to so many trips and so many stupid disagreements but she doesn’t.  This counts.

‘Mulder, leaving aside the fact that you shut off my alarm and made me late, which I will expect payment for in the form of lunch, your treat, later. This’ she gestures at their nakedness, at the hair she is trying desperately to flatten, ‘Can’t eclipse everything else that we are. I won’t sacrifice everything we’ve worked for, the respect we just barely command and our voice at the table just for an orgasm! It’s been six years - It can wait til tonight!’

She races the second hand around her apartment, Mulder at her heels, answering questions he hasn’t yet asked about what they will tell people, ‘Nothing’, whether anyone will notice, ‘They all think we’ve been sleeping together for years’, and what he’s going to wear. Ten minutes sees them flustered but presentable, him in a shirt he hasn’t seen in years that smells suspiciously like her laundry powder and her with an all too plausible excuse about him forcing her to meet him to look at a potential X-File at the crack of dawn just past a traffic black spot. Scully is right, Mulder realises, to insist that they keep up all of the things that have brought them together. He loves her as much in her endless practicality as he did earlier in her naked glory, he just wishes she could have been right a few moments later.

She fumbles on her side table for the keys she tossed down the night before and is about to hasten away when he pulls her in, firm against her protestations until she rests flush to him, eyes wide with indignation at his delay. Asking her to stay with his eyes he releases his arm to smooth a stray strand of auburn behind her ear, thumb lingering possessively on her cheekbone before he dips his head to kiss her. He couldn’t end this chapter without claiming one last, selfish full-stop; punctuating all that this means to him with his lips on hers and a mumbled, “Good morning Scully”.

Scully pulls back, satisfaction tempering her haste and as they cross the threshold, door swinging shut on their first night, she lets him hold her hand.


	3. The Debrief

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Zombie apocalypse or not, bureaucracy know no end and our sex-rumpled agents report for duty.

There are few fates crueller than a mandatory debrief on New Year’s Day and the skeleton staff at the Hoover building closely resemble the reanimated corpses that necessitated their presence at work on a public holiday. Arriving late, Mulder slides past the half-cogent security guard, hand fixed firmly in its’ familiar spot between Scully’s ribs and hips. At first this familiarity was just a gesture of guidance, caution or an expression of urgency but over time it became an anchor, a way of making sure she was still with him, of feeling her close. Today it is both of those things and something new. She will always be his anchor but now she’s also his, his Scully, and his sense of urgency is closely linked to getting through this damn meeting and taking her away from other people. It’s selfish but he needs to have her to himself again for as long as she will let him.

Scully seems oblivious to his motives. At least she hopes so. She’s working hard to appear neutral though the reality is that his hand on her back is hot and heavy with promise and she’s biting the edge of her tongue in an attempt to halt the sympathetic heat that’s building between her legs. It had been easy earlier to bury her frustrated lust under adrenaline and anxious energy but now they are here things have slowed and her muscle memory is recalling more intimate places that his fingers have recently explored. He’s so close she can almost taste him which makes her want to taste him. All of him. When their lateness forces them to sit across from instead of beside each other at the meeting, four feet of hardwood dilutes his scent to a manageable level and she’s relieved. Briefly.

She has hardly opened her jotter when Scully feels his eyes on her, laser hot and focused on her mouth, on the gentle pinch of her lower lip as she swallows and finds her mouth dry and her breath short. The room must be stuffy, she thinks as a blush stains her cheeks and a knowing smirk colours her partner’s hazy stare. Brushing it off, Scully sets her shoulders and fixes her eyes firmly on AD Skinner. Comprehension of his words is still beyond her Mulder-flooded mind but she can at least give the impression that she’s listening even as lazy doodles usurp her usually immaculate notes and mark her distraction on the virgin white of her notebook. Minutes meander and the room is definitely hotter than usual, heaters circulating puffs of stale air laden with cologne and hangover and Mulder. A single bead of sweat has formed on Skinner’s head and is beginning a languid slide down to his brow. Time stumbles and for a microsecond the shine of sweat is Mulder’s body against hers, light caught in the evidence of what he is doing to her. No! Not here! Scully forces her eyes to the table, grounding herself in the grain even as she becomes aware of a pointed silence in the room and an insistent nudging at her ankle.

Mulder’s best on-the-spot crazy conspiracy talk is barely enough to explain why his partner had just all but shouted “no” midway through a routine debrief. He trips over small deceits, playing fast and loose with chronology and the few facts they do have. A shaky cover up becomes a battle not to respond to Scully’s dilated pupils which are fixed firmly to his lips even as he tries to save them both, explaining her outburst as a response to the trauma of last night but still preserving her integrity as his sceptical double. Yes he believes his assailants were undead. No, Scully cannot and will not corroborate that fact without conducting further tests. In the confusion of his speech Scully’s indiscretion is forgotten and as the meeting continues she manages the occasional supportive noise, hums and tuts that would be innocent if they didn’t echo back as the noises she had made on top of him just hours before. Mulder wonders that the table between them has not warped under the force of the tension stretched wire-tight between them.

He swears it will all be okay if they can just survive the last two action points and resolve the official statement. He thinks that it would be bearable if Scully could just stop dipping the tip of her pen into her mouth, hints of moisture and flashes of teeth tempting all of his blood from his head to his groin. Perhaps she might if only Mulder could stop himself from breaching the under-table no-mans-land, sliding the toe of his shoe just inside the hem of her pants leg, soothing the site of his earlier nudge with the kiss of polished leather. Thank god for winter colds and hangovers dulling the observation skills of the room, hiding Agent Mulder’s hasty trouser leg rearrangement as he rushes out for lunch, for burying Agent Scully’s heavy breathing in ambient noise as she follows him to the basement. Thank god that they have a reputation for strange behaviour in meetings.

The elevator is a white-knuckle ride that lasts forever, Scully clinging to the railing behind her back as the watchful CCTV camera prevents her from indulging her reckless hunger. Mulder’s hands are worrying his tie in a way that is too frantic to pass as nonchalant, drawing shaky breaths of oxygen and wicked intentions past the knot which finally surrenders and leaves the way clear for eager hands. The door opens and the light sensors chase them down the hall, no darkness deep enough to hide the intention of his hand on her ass, hers pulling his tie free as the door slams to their office, them on one side and the world on the other.

Scully had planned to set ground rules in the event of their connection turning physical, numbers 1-5 of which would all have prohibited what Mulder was currently doing, shirt buttons whispering goodbye to their embroidered companions and pants pooling at her ankles. But that was before she knew exactly how he would feel inside her, before she began to wonder how that sensation would be heightened by location and position. The lines between professional and personal melt to nothing as it suddenly becomes very important to know how it will feel to fuck Mulder on the same desk where he was sitting when they first met.

She half laughs as once again their coupling begins with a shower of manila folders, a fitting reprisal for the files that have spent six years occupying their time when they could have been doing this instead. How has she waited so long to see that look in his eye, the animal hunger and feral happiness that lights him up as he presses his hardness to her stomach and his hand to her pussy, fully clothed and coarse against the stark white silk of her skin. Caught between the firm press of the desk and the delicious heaviness that is him Scully realises that should anyone walk in she would be unable to pass this off as anything other than what it is and with that realization comes a dizzying sort of freedom. She is no longer just Mulder’s colleague and friend, not just his touchstone or his constant but also now his lover and his love and the truth in tandem with his dabbling fingers almost undoes her.

Mulder begins to complain when Scully’s hands stop their reflexive grasping against his chest to disrupt his fingers’ exploration. He had hoped to keep going until his desk is indelibly infused with the scent of her, until the room wears the perfume of her climax but she wants more than his hands. Her movements are frantic and deliberate, bare feet to his buttocks pulling the dark fabric of his suit to where his hands have left her open and glistening and starting a rhythmic give and take that leaves no question as to her desire. She drop one of his hands at her breast, cooing against his collarbone when he circles once and then fills his palm with her flesh, thumb finding the sensitive centre and teasing it to the point of agony. Then there are hands at his throat determinedly parting fabric, tearing the top buttons to expose the hollow sweep of his collarbone, making space for sharp teeth and greedy lips, a sucking, savouring kiss that he knows will leave a mark.

It’s fitting really. Mulder has been a marked man since the first day that Dana Scully cast her questioning gaze on his alien abduction theory but to have her acknowledge it, to have her actively claim her territory in this office of all places is an experience close to euphoria. There’s a millisecond where he wonders if anything could be better than this and then there are hands on his zipper and heat through his boxers and he knows that it’s only the start.

Where the night before had slowed as they approached climax, drawing out the long imagined moment into a dreamlike sepia exposure, today it only speeds up. She’s hardly pushed his boxers low enough to free his cock when he’s inside her, one hand bracing on the table and fixing her to him and the other grasping her hair and forcing her mouth to his, swallowing her noises before they can echo down the abandoned halls of their workplace. Mulder groans when he feels her hand drop between them to add to the symphony of sensation, picking out her pleasure in lyrical trills as he pounds a heavy bass accompaniment. He loses her mouth with his breath, gasping for sanity in the Scully-sweet air above her shoulder and feeling her gather around him. She’s so close. So, so close that she scrapes her teeth hard down the front of his shirt gathering enough fabric to bite down on in case she screams loud enough to breach the stairwell, silence and speed the unspoken terms of this moment.

It’s the silence that saves them, the elevator bell slicing through the still air and the white heat that had been building behind their eyelids. It’s the starting pistol of a mad rush, a realisation that there is not time for them both to escape the sharp staccato heels which are counting down to discovery. Fabric smoothed, kicked or hidden away. Quick thinking and deep breaths.

Kimberley taps once on the door but enters without waiting for a response. Her habits are as old as their indiscretions are new..

‘Agent Mulder? The Assistant Director would like to see you please?’

She can’t see his face as he closes the cupboard he has been rummaging in but she can hear his displeasure in his voice.

‘It’s New Year’s Day. Can’t it wait?’ he complains, gathering some tumbled files before straightening up with a very odd expression on his face. Skinner’s assistant glances around for his usual shadow before asking, ‘Have you seen Agent Scully? I need to get her to sign off on this report and then we can all go home’.

Mulder just shrugs, mumbling something about Scully and the ladies room and there’s definitely something not quite right about Mr Never-Quite-Right. Kimberley files the riddle for another, shorter day before following Mulder out of the office. As he passes under the overhead light she points out a wet patch where he must have spilled something on his shirt, teasing that he’s more of a mess today than usual.

‘You have no idea’ is his only response and as the doors of the elevator seal them away a throaty giggle starts to issue from the cupboard Mulder has just been attending to. For the first time in her FBI career Dana Scully is thankful for her small stature; uncoiling her limbs and trying vainly to cover herself with just her shirt as she waits a few seconds before venturing out to locate the rest of her clothing. Later, she decides, she will relentlessly mock Mulder for panicking and putting her up on a shelf and then scold him for making her forget her sanity and almost getting them both a caution and a new assignment. For now though all she can think about is is the wet spot on his shirt,the corresponding one in her underwear and the fastest way of getting him home, away from every interruption until he has helped her to recreate the New Year’s firework spectacular on the insides of her eyelids.


	4. The End

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After multiple interruptions can Mulder finally finish what he started!

More than an hour has passed by the time Mulder makes it out of Skinner’s office, numb from the endless argument about how to say “it was zombies” without actually saying that it was zombies. The short night’s sleep has caught up to him and he sighs with relief as he rounds the last corner of the day and comes to rest in the doorway of their basement office. He hoped for a homecoming, for a chance to pick up where they had left off,  but the room is dark and devoid of Scully. Fluorescent lights flicker on and shine unforgiving on hard corners that offer none of the soft comfort he dreamed of. She never normally leaves without saying goodbye and for the first time since his lips met hers last night, Mulder feels uneasy. 

They’ve tiptoed around this particular truth for years, some days stepping bravely up to the line of flirtation and others skittering backwards, rewriting history to maintain the status quo. For him that is all done with now and he is changed permanently by her touch. He belongs, irreversibly, to Scully. Mind and matter. Everything before yesterday is already fading into a sepia history; life before-Scully cannot compare to the technicolour tomorrows of his imagination. He offers a tentative prayer up to every deity he can think of that she feels the same.

Gathering himself enough to step around his apocalyptic thoughts and into the office, Mulder heads straight to his desk where, just hours before, he fulfilled one of his oldest fantasies. An after-image of her, honey-pale and back arched into him in the midst of all the grey, causes a stirring in his pants and a hitch in his breath. Even in her absence Scully controls him. The vision fades and in the space it leaves is a piece of paper, a takeout menu, with her favourite dishes circled, as if he needs the reminder. At the bottom is a scrawled ‘8pm.’ The invitation crawls off the page and into his chest to soothe his worries, a small promise of another moment, another opportunity to finish what they started.

The last time he was in the hospital, Mulder had started counting his heartbeats as a way of passing time. In the quiet white nights on the ward the one-two beat in his chest echoed the syllables of Scully’s name, counting the seconds before her lashes would flicker awake in the hard chair by the bedside or the minutes before her footsteps in the hallway carried her back to him. Today that rhythm accompanies him through the motions of normality, reminding him with every breath that everything is different now. He weaves home through the traffic to get ready for her, only to realise that he doesn’t know what that means. He searches for the t-shirt she once told him she liked and groans when he finds it dirty. He throws sweatpants, toothpaste and a razor into a bag, thrilling at the implications of packing to stay and then seconds later unpacks again, scared that he is assuming too much. He wastes ten minutes staring at the box of condoms in his bedside table, the untouched cellophane and expired sell-by date a monument to his fidelity. There has been nobody but Scully for him for years and he thinks that she knows that.

Mulder closes the drawer and repacks his bag, shutting himself out of his apartment before he can overthink this any more. He waits in line for their food wondering how Scully has spent these past few hours. Is she also spiralling through past, present, and future trying to make sense of it all? Has she found herself standing motionless, midway through some normal activity locked tightly in a whisper of memory that arrests every sense? He feels her cheek in his hand as he pays for the meal, her lips marking his neck when he goes to adjust his collar. Will she be waiting for him, in the rumpled remains of her work clothes, shoes kicked off, wine in hand with her top three buttons undone to reveal just a shadow of cleavage? Or will she have lit candles and hidden something sinful and silky between a sweater and her perfect skin? Stifling a groan Mulder tries desperately to banish the vision as it sends blood racing to his cheeks and his groin. He escapes the restaurant with steaming containers of food and most of his dignity, abandoning his car to walk the last few blocks to Scully’s apartment. He tries not to hurry, drawing in deep breaths of chilly air to ground and calm him as he traces the familiar route to her side.

But when she opens the door in something soft, snug and knitted, his mouth goes dry as his heart stops. A small smile is his only greeting when he steps once more into her world, his limbs impossibly long and awkward under her gaze. This new normal is a mixed blessing; Mulder hopes he never stops seeing Scully in this honeymoon light, that she will always have the power to move him past the point of reason but he also wishes he could remember how to speak, how to explain some of what he is thinking to her, instead of just staring in mute, frozen adoration.

Scully busies herself with the food and tries to pretend that she can’t feel Mulder’s eyes following her around the room from the spot by the door where he remains rooted. When the dishes are laid out, all reasonable distractions exhausted, she stands and fiddles with the edge of her grey sweater-dress, an impulse-purchased, rarely-worn garment that was just one in a pile of “maybes” until he arrived ten minutes early. She feels small in her bare feet, somehow exposed, though the knitted fabric covers her to the knee. Logically she knows that this is just her and Mulder but she can’t shake the feeling that she is wearing somebody else’s clothes, living somebody else’s life, that Mulder’s lovers gaze is not meant for her. She bites her lip as she turns to him, regretting now the grace period she gave herself to get ready for the evening.

Scully had hoped to find clarity in the deep bubbles of her bath, some easy logic to explain why even after yesterday, the thought of them together tonight short-circuited her nervous system. The giddy romance of the morning, of bathroom nuzzling, bedroom eyes and doorway kisses, was overwhelming. Part of her wanted to lose herself to it but the scientist in her remembered that every action requires an equal and opposite reaction. This morning at the office showed her that. She and Mulder were old friends, older colleagues but brand new lovers and, as the sensible half of their yin-yang, it would fall to her to make sure the new didn’t destabilise the old. This afternoon was supposed to be an exercise in normalisation, in defusing her raging hormones and preparing to discuss over dinner how they would go about keeping their relationship separate from their work. Instead, her good intentions have inserted an unfamiliar stillness between them, a silence that dulls the certainty of desire and hangs quivering in the air, waiting to be broken.

Mulder’s pupils dilate when she worries her lip, but he doesn’t move and so Scully punctures the silence with the ring of spoon on plate, stretching the tension filo-thin across her living room. She has cleaned up the broken glass of last night’s desperation but she can still feel it, pricking at the edges of her consciousness, digging into her chest as she forces herself to the couch, forces herself to eat, and watches him follow her lead. Mulder sits at the other end of the couch, his old, platonic position and the oxygen in the space between them starts to thin, every forkful agonising. She waits for Mulder to start his customary mealtime babble, to comfort her with stupid jokes and random tangents, and when he doesn’t she flicks on the TV, just for something to do, anything to end this awful silence. At least now she can no longer make out each individual click of his teeth as he chews.

They finish eating at the same time, her head start cancelled out by his careless speed and they slide their plates onto the coffee table with a synchronised scrape. For a second there is stillness and then somehow their empty hands are full of each other and sound and sensation snap back into place. Scully is unsure whether Mulder pulls her into his lap or her own desire closes the distance but the desperate moan that slips past his enquiring lips is definitely hers. He tastes of soy sauce and beer and she’s suddenly starving again for what only he can give her.

Mulder is equally desperate, seeking her tongue and humming his approval when she darts it out to claim the corner of his mouth, whispering her intentions up his cheekbone and across to his ear. The soft barrier of knitted dress frustrates his hands as he seeks skin, teasing him as it hugs her form but denies him access. The downy hollow of her throat is not enough and so he roams southward, finding the hem and pushing it up her legs. Just as it reaches her thighs Scully pulls away, stumbling to her feet and folding her arms against his advances even as her eyes write him a love letter.

‘Mulder we need to talk.’ Her voice is an octave too low and punctuated by ragged breaths, her words a clashing melody fighting the inviting hum of the rest of her body. He stands and steps toward her, driving her back in the direction of the bedroom as she tries to maintain a safe distance.

‘Can’t we talk later?’ Mulder aims for brooding but gets petulant and decides he doesn’t care. He needs her right now, and more than that he needs to see her catch fire beneath him. He needs to know how she looks when she loses control.

But his Scully is a stubborn woman and she shakes her head, tugging her dress back down her legs as they continue to circle one another. The fabric sliding smoothly over her hips draws his eyes downward, and he suddenly realises that he hadn’t felt any resistance under the knitwear when she was straddling him. He forces his eyes back, seeing her mouth moving but no longer processing anything beyond the knowledge that there may be only one garment between him and her naked body. One thin, grey layer between his gaze and her perfect breasts.

‘Scully, are you wearing underwear?’ His demand is hoarse and cuts across whatever rational thoughts she has been laying on his deaf ears. She flushes and fidgets, trying not to look at the straining hardness in his jeans that is bordering on painful now that he knows his deduction was right.

‘Mulder…’ She’s battling to keep her composure, her body betraying her at every turn. Even from the other side of the couch Mulder can see her nipples are hard, that her pulse is flickering fast in her throat and her lips are plump and wet from the unconscious attention of her teeth and tongue.

‘Mulder, I need to know that this isn’t going to affect our jobs or our friendship. I need to know how this is going to work!’ Scully has given up backing away now, her plea tangled with want and concern and uncertainty and Mulder only wants her to feel one of those things. So as he rounds the couch he forces himself to pause and take her hand.

‘Scully. I don’t know what to tell you except that I will do whatever you need me to do to make this,’ he gestures at the space between them, ‘work for you on every level it can. If you want to transfer off the X-Files, it’ll kill me but I’ll survive as long as I get to keep this. If you want me to run naked through the bullpen with “Dana Scully has me whipped” written on my ass I’ll do that too. All I want is you. Tell me what you want and it’s yours.’

With all his cards on the table Mulder watches her eyes carefully, ready for the arguments and questions that are so intrinsically part of their every discussion but for once he finds only blue. Scully’s pulse under his thumb is hummingbird fast and he realises she’s moving, rising to her tiptoes, tipping her chin to reach for his mouth. He holds perfectly still and waits for her to come to him, restraint at breaking point. His heart is so loud in his ears that he almost misses what she whispers against his mouth in the millisecond before she kisses him.

‘Just you.’

And it’s done. Words have no further part to play here though there’s poetry in the reluctance of her dress to part from the neat curves of her nakedness. Three tugs and the battle is won, the garment starting a trail of clothes lost to greedy hands as they stumble, locked together to the bedroom.

They stall in the doorway when Scully finally fills her small hand with his hardness and tries to follow the sweep of her palm with her mouth. Her teeth are raking down his chest when, through the haze of his arousal, Mulder remembers the balance of pleasure is unfairly skewed in his favour. Groaning at the soon-to-be missing sensation he winds his fingers into the fiery hair tickling his navel and pulls her back to safer territory, abandoning his need to focus on her. Scully mewls in protest at her interrupted exploration, reaching back down for him until he grabs her wrist and wraps it around his neck, pulling her off her feet with one arm under her ass. She wraps her legs around his hips and pulls herself flush to him, wet against his stomach, wet against his neck and so, so hot as he escapes the doorway and crosses, drunk on her, to the bed.

Scully’s changed the sheets since this morning, hospital corners tucked almost as tightly together as their bodies are now. Mulder will never tire of seeing her pale limbs framing his hips, the weight of her on his lap as her eyelids flutter inches from his own and their breath mingles. She reaches between them and again he grabs at her, pushing her hands to her sides and holding them firmly in place. She writhes in his lap, pressing for contact between her crotch and his expectant cock, mumbling her displeasure between kisses but he will not be swayed, using his grip to lever her away from his body and finally flip her off him and onto the bed.

Laid bare and panting on the backdrop of her coverlet, Scully is a masterpiece in muted tones broken by moments of brazen colour: her white wrists cuffed by his tanned hands, hair dragging russet seams through the sweat of her brow and glimpses of damp pink, hidden now but promising paradise. Realising she is unable to move, she stills beneath him, eyes limpid as Mulder imagines a thousand ways to undo her with every breath. The tiny scrap of rational thought left at the back of his mind tells him there is time enough in their future for every one of them, that he should avoid overthinking, but the man in love has taken control and he wants perfection.

He loosens his hold on her wrists experimentally to see if she will move and when she doesn’t he dips forward to kiss her, wincing slightly at the pressure on his arm. Mulder abandoned his sling at Hegal Place, choosing free-movement, gritted teeth and distraction over the barrier of his sprained arm constantly between them. He wonders for a second if he’s made a mistake, the pain swelling as he drops lower, favouring the other arm, but then he feels her breasts brush his chest and the discomfort is worth it. More than worth it, every rising breath skims pleasure across their bodies, pebbled nipples ruffling the hairs on his chest and sinking with a sigh between her lips. Soon the ripples of pleasure turn stormy and one tan leg presses open two slim white ones, one hand meandering down Scully’s torso, sacrificing the full body contact for the first act of her pleasure.

Fingers. His, dabbling maddening, random pathways over her thighs until hers clutch the sheets in desperation. Mulder hears the plea in her sounds, in the rolling of her hips, and relents, carrying his intentions to where she is wet and waiting for him. Scully feels better than he remembered and he tells her so, chuckling slightly at the colour that rises in her cheeks at his words. Scully has always been a cocktail of contradictions and her loves her for it, especially now, as she dips her eyes, seemingly embarrassed by his words, only to become transfixed by the sight of his hand moving between her legs, his thumb drawing insistent circles on her clitoris. She’s still thinking, Mulder realises, and slips a second finger inside changing the angle and increasing the pressure until her head drops back and her eyes close.

Her chest heaves surrender with every stroke, breasts advancing and retreating  just out of reach. He is ravenous for them, his mouth craving the same barrage of sensation that his other senses are experiencing; handfuls of eager flesh, staccato moans, the arch of her neck and heady sweet smell of her tying it all together. Reluctantly he pauses to fill this gap, moving over her with a stolen kiss, a whisper of his cock on her belly. Mulder follows his desire down through the valley between her breasts, pausing to taste the sweat-salted groove under her ribs and velvet curve of her belly. And then it all comes together in one sweet, sticky tangle.

Hands in hair, dragging quivering thighs over straining shoulders and the flicker of a tongue wet with more than saliva. He measures his success by the noises she makes; the hard thrust of two fingers makes her gasp but merits a moan when paired with hot breath where she is most sensitive. Around the insistence of his fingers Mulder teases with the absence of his mouth, waiting for the hard press of sharp nails in his scalp to drive him on and then repents with the flat of his tongue pressed firmly to her clit. He hears Scully try to tell him she is close, half-words fighting for oxygen. He feels it in her grasp on his head, in the flutter of her pussy around his fingers. He wants to feel her release in his hands, he wants to taste the moment of ecstasy, to be in the midst of it all when she comes because of him. He wants to drown in her and never surface but now is not that moment.

Scully feels Mulder pull away just as she reaches the point of no return. The past few minutes have been a blur of sensation, of colours and shapes and insensible moaning, but now he is not touching her and she can’t understand why. She peels her eyes open, half expecting him to have got up and gone, leaving her hanging for a fourth time but instead finds his eyes gold flecked and inches from her own. And then his cock is where his fingers and lips have just been, his intentions as clear as the shine of her wetness on his lips. He doesn’t pause before guiding himself into her, hips taking over the pulsing beat of pleasure and bringing her back to the brink of sanity.

His movements are short and precise, angled to strike smoothly at the hotspot within, fullness and friction daubing bright red highlights across her nerve endings and the backs of her eyelids. His pace is unhurried but relentless and when his fingers drop to frame his actions, knuckles amplifying each thrust straight to her clit, Scully knows that this is all for her. That this man is it for her.

‘Open your eyes,’ Mulder pleads. She battles the fluttering of her lids and meets his stare, his eyes as familiar to her as her own reflection but somehow now entirely new. And that’s where it begins. Something unlocks in the back of her head and rushes liquid down her spine to where he’s inside her. It gathers pace, drawing energy from her limbs, her skin, from every pore and focuses it deep within her, a pulsing ball of energy that he has ignited.

‘Mulder!’ She doesn’t know if she says it aloud or sings it with her eyes, but he smiles and the flash of white echoes at her core as scalding, shuddering heat. She clenches her fists, clenches her jaw, her whole body shakes with the intensity that is Mulder, hard and honest above her, watching her come. As the first throes weaken and aftershocks run giddily along his length still buried within her she opens her eyes to see him watching her like she is a deity, like she is the whole universe. He is perfectly still, waiting for her to make the next move. The fire inside her transforms from searing heat to a agonising simmer, the familiar scorch of him being close but not close enough and so she pushes him to swing on top. Sinking further on to him she finds herself stretching and sighing until her ass rests on his thighs and his cock presses against her cervix, fuller than she knew she could be and yet…

‘More.’ It’s a husky, half-heard demand that Mulder is eager to heed, the quake of her internal muscles still playing along his length as he bucks his hips up and watches transfixed as her breasts echo the movement, nipples nodding their approval at the rough rhythm he sets. Scully bears down, hands braced on his hips, each thrust met with a little roll of her hips that shatters his carefully maintained control.

He had planned to make her come over and over, prolonging her pleasure until she begged him to stop. It was the least he could do after making her wait 24 hours longer than the six years they’d already wasted. But then he’d watched her lose herself around him, the arch of her body and the circle of her mouth an erotic geometry he could never have fantasized, the sound of her breath tugging ragged past her teeth pure music. And then when she looked at him like he was the only thing in her life that was still real, looked at him like he felt about her… every plan and imagining he’d had about what they might be like together crumbled to ash and left him raw and revealed in the aftermath of her love. He let her take over, the gravity of her need bringing him back to the bedroom where now she rides him, resplendent, toward a precipice from which they can never return.

The last act was all about Scully but this is their moment, locked together like two halves of a long-lost whole. Mulder grabs handfuls of her, mapping the reach of his fingers around the dip of her waist, leaving his handprint in the sweat over her heart. She is focused on the pleasure-pain of him driving into her, he is already deeper than anyone who has gone before him but she still wants more, wants to go back to the burning place of her climax with him at her side. Once can be a struggle for her, twice is unheard of but this is Mulder and as if he can read her mind sits up, pulling her into his lap to catch her clitoris against his pubic bone with every thrust. Pressed tight to him, the scrape of teeth at her collarbone sets off a chain reaction that brings another orgasm into focus, within tasting distance as he tightens beneath her and they coil tighter and tighter toward their breaking point.

The ring of her phone is an alien sound, shouting from the bedside table and invading their private paradise. They ignore the interruption, chasing their climax until the ringing is replaced by the voice of Margaret Scully, wishing her daughter a happy new year. There is no room in this place for that Dana Scully, and the wanton, wanting version that has taken her place lunges unceremoniously across the bed to tear the cord out of the wall and quiet the offending device. Mulder follows her, folding over her her from behind and sliding back home, hardly missing a stroke. She presses her face into the covers, her ass back to him and cries out when he reaches down and pinches her clit before settling into a heady tempo, chasing down their release.

Scully feels her entire body tense, the sensation focusing on the points where her sensitive nipples are dragging across the cover, where his fingers play her like a virtuoso, where he is claiming her pussy as his own. Faster and deeper, the current drags her along the surface and then calling her name he comes, pulling her under. She thinks maybe she is speaking in tongues, the noises that she gasps into the covers are nothing she has heard before, some animal response to the sensation of Mulder pulsing inside, the melting wet heat of him marking her as his from the inside out. She’s read about toe-curling pleasure, maybe experienced it once or twice but this is so much more. She’s not even sure she still has toes, limbs even. The world has crystallized down to the points where Mulder is touching her, the fragments of her name that drip from his lips where they are pressed to her neck.

It take minutes to come back from this kind of undoing, to work out where he ends and she begins. They are in no hurry and so they revel in the slick of sweat cooling, of breathing slowing, of turning to face one another and realising they are done with running away. The air is thick with the smell of them, echoing with the memory of declarations panted against conquered flesh. Mulder ignores once more the throb of his arm to pull her close, needing both hands to wrap her in his love and to trace promises on her cheek.

There are no words for what has been done, nothing meaningful that they can say and so instead they float in sweet silence, eyes drifting shut and hearts open. Finally they have found an irrefutable truth and though it may not be what they set out to find, it’s close to perfect.


End file.
